{"title":"The Child Snatched Away: Reading Revelation Through a Childist Lens","authors":"Sharon Betsworth","doi":"10.1163/15685152-2805a007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-2805a007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 A great deal of biblical interpretation over the past 30 years has focused upon imagery related to women in the book of Revelation. Very little scholarship has discussed children in Revelation, likely because there are very few in the Apocalypse. However, the limited passages in which children are present deserve to be examined with a focus upon the child. This article will discuss two passages in Revelation which refer to children, Rev. 2:18–29 and Rev. 12:1–5, with the latter receiving greater attention. I will analyze these passages using childist interpretation, building upon Kathleen Gallagher Elkins’s study of feminist and childist interpretation, which uses Rev. 12 as a case study to apply both methods to the same text. Imperial-critical reading will enhance the interpretation of these passages. As I discuss Rev. 12, I will also compare the myth of three Greek child gods, Apollo, Dionysius, and Persephone, to the child snatched away in Rev. 12:5, to understand more fully how this child fits within the overall message of Revelation.","PeriodicalId":43103,"journal":{"name":"Biblical Interpretation-A Journal of Contemporary Approaches","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43951825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Biblical Interpretations and/as Queer Temporalities: A Response","authors":"Jacqueline M. Hidalgo","doi":"10.1163/15685152-2804a007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-2804a007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This response discusses the conjunction of “queer,” “temporalities,” and “biblical interpretation.” I argue that these essays demonstrate, through their turn to queer temporalities, that attending to queer time means attending to people in time, to their social practices, to dynamics of power, to violence, to survival, to the lost pasts whose voices still call out to our own, and to the choices we make in reading. The response also turns to borderlands theories, especially the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, and decolonial feminist thought, particularly that of María Lugones, in order to ask questions about biblical studies that cross borders.","PeriodicalId":43103,"journal":{"name":"Biblical Interpretation-A Journal of Contemporary Approaches","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44674447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sarah’s Laugh, Sodom’s Sin, Hagar’s Kin: Queering Time and Belonging in Genesis 16-21","authors":"Matthew Elia","doi":"10.1163/15685152-2804a002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-2804a002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The story of Sodom’s destruction bears the weight of a long history of violence against queer people. The now-standard revisionist view argues the story has nothing to do with sexuality, but rather the ancient ethic of hospitality toward strangers. This article reconsiders both Sodom’s sin and the hospitality ethic of “inclusion” through a series of tropological readings linking Sodom to Sarah’s laugh and Hagar’s wandering. Parts 1 and 2 suggest that, in Sarah’s cynicism and Sodom’s violent grasp for control, the text shows readers competing modes of response to the temporality of strange flesh—to queer futures arriving as wandering divine visitors. Part 3 examines how this reading recasts contemporary debates among Christian interpreters concerning sexuality and among queer theorists concerning temporality and inclusion. Part 4 on Jude’s reinterpretation of Sodom and Part 5 on Hagar imagine ethical possibilities otherwise—beyond “including” strangers, toward undermining the logic of estrangement itself.","PeriodicalId":43103,"journal":{"name":"Biblical Interpretation-A Journal of Contemporary Approaches","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15685152-2804a002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49309051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Melancholic Hopes, Trans Temporalities, and Haunted Biblical Receptions: A Response","authors":"Joseph A. Marchal","doi":"10.1163/15685152-2804a006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-2804a006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Queer approaches to temporality and hauntology have the significant potential to alter, reframe, and expand our understandings and uses of biblical texts and traditions, as the articles in this special issue demonstrate. Still other striking juxtapositions or analogies should complicate our approaches to these texts and traditions, and plenty more besides. In several places, then, this essay shows how these complications can be challenged and specified by select insights from trans conversations about temporality and haunting. These trans conversations currently range over a large set of dynamics: visibility and violence, fungibility and fugitivity, necropolitics and “negative” affects, from the monstrous to the melancholic. These resonate with the movements of Sarah and Hagar, Joseph and his kin, Judith and her nearly-ghosted slave, the Gerasenes and their demon/iac, among many other biblical figures, in unexpected and illuminating ways. The cyclical, even loopy qualities of queer and, or as, trans temporality and haunting are hardly progressive, but ambivalent, suggesting the especial importance of melancholic hopes for negotiating these haunted biblical receptions. The juxtapositions, allegories, analogies, and applications of these four articles are precisely the sort of receptions and movements that should be ventured more often within biblical interpretation. A receptivity to what still haunts these texts and traditions requires responding to and rejecting the gendered, sexualized, racialized, and colonized terms of visibility they offer, their doors of entry that exceptionalize a select few and estrange those from the rest who are exploited, expelled, or exterminated.","PeriodicalId":43103,"journal":{"name":"Biblical Interpretation-A Journal of Contemporary Approaches","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15685152-2804a006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46855064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Queerness, Time, and Biblical Interpretation","authors":"S. Moore, D. Buell","doi":"10.1163/15685152-2804a001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-2804a001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article introduces a thematic issue of Biblical Interpretation on the “temporal turn” in queer theory as it relates to biblical studies. Queer theorists of time have variously interrogated inherited concepts of history, historiography, historicity, and/or periodicity; the chrononormativity that regulates contemporary sexual lives; reproductive futurism, which evokes “our children” and their future to shore up heteronormativity and anathematize queerness; or explored the complex relations of queerness to the future and hence to hope. The contributions to this thematic issue, also introduced in the article, creatively harness these temporal theories and analytic strategies for queer biblical criticism and queer biblical hermeneutics.","PeriodicalId":43103,"journal":{"name":"Biblical Interpretation-A Journal of Contemporary Approaches","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15685152-2804a001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41638498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Backward Glance for a Queer Utopian Future: Genesis, Climate Change, and Hope as a Hermeneutic","authors":"B. Tipton","doi":"10.1163/15685152-2804a005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-2804a005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article explores the ways in which biblical narratives and queer ecocritical voices can converge to recognize the importance of an intersectional climate change movement: to show that queer ecology matters. Specifically, I argue for an alternative approach to biblical ecocriticism, constructed around a queer(ed) biblical performance. I employ José Esteban Muñoz’s conceptualization of a queer utopian futurity, Lee Edelman’s critique of the political and rhetorical discourse centered on reproductive futurity, and Nicole Seymour’s blending of queer theory and ecocriticism in order to analyze conversations held by a cohort of the environmentally engaged nyc queer community. A performance and retelling of the story of Joseph(ine) in Genesis illustrates how queer engagement with biblical narratives offers an alternative to the dominant narrative of the climate change movement: “We must do it for our kids, for our grandkids.”","PeriodicalId":43103,"journal":{"name":"Biblical Interpretation-A Journal of Contemporary Approaches","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15685152-2804a005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44247048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis: Here and There, Now and Then","authors":"Peter N. McLellan","doi":"10.1163/15685152-2804a003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-2804a003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article seeks to disrupt the deadly deployment of boundaries that mark particular people as normative or queer, socially living or dead. Conversing with the Decapolis of Mark 5:1-20 and Washington D.C.’s prostitution free zones (pfz), the present project deploys a hauntological and critical spatial response, that locates points of contact between transwomen of color in the U.S. capital and the possessed Gerasenes. This article challenges biblical scholars to lean into historiography that sees such stories—from the tombs and from the pfz—as politically active in and of themselves, and with one another. Mark 5:1-20 is imagined here as a place constructed by alliances of queer bodies spatialized into unlivability. Such alliances are resources for thinking beyond the neocapitalist drive to create deadly normativity through insides and outsides, suggesting that biblical texts are always already infused with demands from places where life is suffocated.","PeriodicalId":43103,"journal":{"name":"Biblical Interpretation-A Journal of Contemporary Approaches","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15685152-2804a003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47809563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"No Future for Bethulia? Judith and Queer Time","authors":"Caryn Tamber-Rosenau","doi":"10.1163/15685152-2804a004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-2804a004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The Book of Judith and its main character are fascinating for the ways in which they play with time and history. This article argues that theoretical frameworks of queer temporality are instructive for understanding Judith. Judith’s childlessness, her aberrant daily schedule, and her refusal to work on her enemies’ time mark her as someone resisting normative time and a focus on the future. At the same time, however, Judith does ensure a future for Bethulia, and, by extension, for Israel. Consequently, this article also explores how the Book of Judith itself plays with the idea of history, calling into question the very future Judith supposedly ensures. The article also highlights the absence of eschatological thinking in the Book of Judith. Finally, this article discusses the implications of such an erring, queer narrative for thinking about Jewish history and the biblical canon.","PeriodicalId":43103,"journal":{"name":"Biblical Interpretation-A Journal of Contemporary Approaches","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15685152-2804a004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47215156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Space in Psalm 73 and a New Perspective for the Understanding of Ps. 73:17","authors":"C. Neuber","doi":"10.1163/15685152-00284p09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-00284p09","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, notions of space in biblical texts have been analyzed by means of sociological concepts of spatiality, primarily based on the works of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja. This article explores the heuristic provided by spatial concepts for the understanding of Psalm 73 and the debated understanding of the expression “sanctuaries of God” (מִקְדְּשֵׁי־אֵל) in v. 17. The actions described in this psalm take place in social space that is constituted, endangered and renewed by the actions of the psalm’s protagonists.","PeriodicalId":43103,"journal":{"name":"Biblical Interpretation-A Journal of Contemporary Approaches","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15685152-00284p09","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44353892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ecomimetic Interpretation: Ascertainment, Identification, and Dialogue in Matthew 6:25–34","authors":"R. Copeland","doi":"10.1163/15685152-00284p07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-00284p07","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Biblical scholars often disregard ecological hermeneutics too readily as a special interest approach that is incapable of contributing to wider interpretive and theological conversations. This essay offers a new approach, ecomimetic interpretation, as a reading strategy that can bridge the gap between ecological hermeneutics and other forms of hermeneutical inquiry. Ecomimetic interpretation requires the interpreter to identify with non-human characters in a given text and allow that identification to contribute to the questions and findings that other approaches raise. In doing so, it contributes to such disparate fields as historical critical studies, theology, ethics, and ecological hermeneutics. This essay first develops the method of ecomimetic interpretation, illustrating each step with a brief reading of Matt. 6:25–34, and then surveys the contributions that this reading strategy can make to a variety of disciplines.","PeriodicalId":43103,"journal":{"name":"Biblical Interpretation-A Journal of Contemporary Approaches","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15685152-00284p07","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49262616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}